Already Dead: A California Gothic (50 page)

By squinting his face and looking upward and breathing deeply once, Clarence becalmed his inner atmospheres. He wouldn’t have liked this man anyway. Vinelli kept himself back from a person, regarding the conversation as if it were a road map, keeping a careful watch for any turns that might lead to the subject of credit for his services.

332

“I guess you heard what happened to Billy Fairchild?”

“I heard about it. I heard he got killed last week and last week his brother disappeared.”

“This car is Billy’s and mine. It’s a project I owe to him. Do I have to be any clearer about my attitude?”

“Maybe that’s even more reason. I’m just suggesting the long-term solution. I’m saying do it right. New manifold, paint the engine, shiny new valve covers.”

“Would you be about to tell me Hans and Fritz are waiting at my service? Just got in from Bavaria, hanging out in the garage?” Vinelli had nothing to say. He put his hands on the countertop and rested his weight on them.

“Well, since you invested in the service, how about using it?” Blackly Vinelli said, “I’ll put out an APB for one junk exhaust manifold.”

Clarence waited in silence for a minute.

“How can I help you now?” Vinelli asked.

“Yeah, we just went through how. I don’t wanna push you, but time is of the essence.”

Vinelli manipulated the buttons, and Vanelli’s machine communicated to other machines its interest in Mercedes 190SL exhaust manifolds while Clarence left the place.

Outside he raised the Scout’s hood and checked the oil. It showed a translucent amber on the dipstick, right at the Full line, and he gathered Billy must have changed it recently, but he drove over to Gualala and asked for two quarts of Castrol anyway at Haymaker’s Hardware. While the clerk cruised the aisles in search of it, he stepped behind the counter and lifted a fifty-round box of Pro-Load .44 magnum, pinched it in the waist of his jeans against his belly, and buttoned his flannel shirt over the bulge. He wandered around with his purchased Castrol under his arm until another customer came in, then nicked a cleaning kit on his way out. He wasn’t a thief—on the shelf next to other such gun paraphernalia he laid a twenty-dollar bill—but he wanted no record left of this transaction.

It had been eight days since the killing. He wasn’t sure that people might not be busy at the cabin, so he left the Scout at the property line, beside the shrouded Mercedes, and walked the remainder and came around silently behind the place, not by the Already Dead / 333

path. Nothing stirring but airs and spirits and ghosts…One good thing was being able to ascertain that the police had finished here. And though the scene had already taken on a grisly popularity among young couples, this afternoon teenagers were absent. The water bucket on the porch was nearly empty, the two inches of liquid at its bottom skeined with redwood needles. The kids had torn off and made away with all but microscopic remnants of the yellow crime-scene flagging across the cabin’s entry. Meadows pushed through the door and in the red sunset glow took note of the brown blots intersected by the chalk outline of Billy’s bust on the table, and of Billy’s chair, which had been moved and the chalk half circle on the seat of it smeared and effaced by sub-sequent occupants. Billy had kept abreast of things with a twelve-volt automotive radio: the device and the battery had absconded. The cops or the kids had taken Billy’s deer rifle. The trash bucket, and the woodstove’s mouth, bristled with crunched takeout pizza boxes. Under the stove a rat had built and abandoned a bed of chinkapin leaves and pink fiberglass insulation.

Meadows wept and wiped at his eyes, traipsing among the blood-stains. Surely he’d heard of some sort of rite to be performed now for this departed earth dweller. In fact he had heard of just such a thing, and what he’d heard had been running in his blood, if not in his mind, and his blood had brought him here: in an article about the Dead Sea Scrolls, he read that the scrolls had been discovered first by three brothers who’d taken to a cave together with the extracted heart of an enemy, the murderer of another of their brothers. They’d killed and eviscerated this man, were preparing to eat his most vital part as a rite of vengeance when they stumped across the sacred texts. He knew the bastards who’d murdered Billy. And he determined at this moment that he’d be hungry when he crossed their path, that he’d eat nothing until that intersection should be accomplished.

Meadows went out the sliding glass doors onto the deck and down the steps into the gully back of the cabin, his resolve already slipping away beneath his feet. The door to Billy’s shed was still padlocked, and he fingered the dust around the threshold for the key. On the one hand he wanted to avenge his grief. On the other he felt his grief tilting toward contempt for Billy’s luck. They’d closed the zipper over his face, thereby expunged his right to compassion. The desire to eliminate these bastards seemed a combination of simple business

334 / Denis Johnson

prudence and human judgmentalism that struck Meadows as ultimately arrogant. But he was in motion now, and here was the key in the dirt.

He let himself in among shelves and barrels full of BMW motorcycle parts, nuts and bolts and gears and cams once greasy, now whiskered with dust, also his own surfboard laid lengthwise improperly on the floor below his black wetsuit spread-eagle on the wall. He located Billy’s old lever-action Winchester, a weapon still manufactured in the style designed by Robert Moses Browning six years before this most terrible century. They came in various calibers. This one was a pretty rusty .44

magnum. Standing in the doorway he jacked the lever and peered down the barrel, holding the action open to the light. The barrel appeared to be full of something.

Shifting the rifle occasionally from hand to hand, he hiked back up off the property. At the Mercedes he untied its cover’s stays on the driver’s side so as to get at and collect the possessions of his life, his Brunswick bowling ball, his pool cue, the trumpet he’d never played.

At this final ridiculous thing, this moment with the rifle and cue stick in his embrace, the bowling bag between his feet, the trumpet dangling from his fingers by its tuning slide, his grief began to purge itself, he wept with these absurdities in his arms.

He left the Scout in the meadow overgrazed and spotted with dusty fern. When he approached the pen, the sheep moved in a small mob to the other end. It was late in the afternoon and she’d herded them back inside after their meager pasturing.

Himself, he didn’t eat such meat. It smelled on a fire not much different than it did on the hoof. Lambs a few months along exclaimed bitterly amid the fold.

A split rail barred the property’s gate, which he didn’t disturb for fear other animals might be wandering free somewhere back of it. He gripped a post and scissored over the slats, and strolled across ground stamped bare and scattered with long peacock feathers in an airy silence.

Then he heard the peacock’s protest like a silly horn. As he passed nearby the bird suddenly pivoted and unfurled its shivering fan, eyes in the feathers looking right into his own. At the gate to the house yard a bushy white dog rose up from the shade of the Sheep Queen’s banged-around van and walked over stiff-legged to snuff at his hands and crotch and lean against his thigh.

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Next the Sheep Queen herself came around from behind the house in a long crinkled linen skirt and dusty laced boots and blue work shirt with her cuffs buttoned at the wrists, her eyes turning in her face like polished wheels, and accused him of being from the county.

He’d known her for years, mostly at one remove, and she’d always looked like this, her hair white as an albino’s and radiating from her skull, the complexion of her face sun-cured, her attention groping in a way that made you wonder what was happening behind you. In Haight-Ashbury also she’d ranked as royalty, the Mescaline Queen. Since the sixties the Haight had been scoured of its psychotropic anarchy, slowly and almost completely, certainly much more so than this woman’s synapses. “I’m not employed by the county,” he told her.

“I thought you were the building inspector. The new guy. He’s been tagging various places, so we’re informed.”

“No, I’m Clarence.”

“Yeah…we’ve met a time or two.”

“Where’s your peacock at? He was here a minute ago.”

“He gets all around the place. We think he roosts in a tree. We don’t know who owns him.”

“Building inspector hasn’t been here yet?”

“Not unless you’re him.”

“Police?”

“Never happen.”

“I thought I might visit in your trailer a minute. She home?”

“As far as we know,” she said.

“What’s your dog’s name?”

“His name’s Fucker.”

How the Sheep Queen got money wasn’t generally understood, but she made enough to get along on and also to have bought the Silver Stream parked by the creek down behind the stalls. The sheep were pets, family, not livestock. She bred several varieties and kept them segregated in pens, but if one was sick she brought it into the house.

She kept Melissa on although she trashed things. Everybody kept Melissa on although she trashed things.

You couldn’t hurt the aluminum shells of these rigs, but the window screens were in shreds, and both tires had gone flat. He slapped his hand on the side of it as he stepped up onto the cinder-block 336 / Denis Johnson

stoop and pushed the door open without waiting for any word.

Inside the trailer it was dark. Only the TV was happening. A fire burned on the screen, increasing with a series of whooshing explosions, crackling, flashing, and whirling, a cyclone of flame. Sitting there almost looking at it was Melissa, sweet little thing with her heart attacks and twisted tortures. The dwelling seemed unexpectedly somber and chaste.

“You must’ve cleaned her up.”

“Why?”

“Nelson says you’re a pig.”

She got up and took him by the hands. She wore a half-cut T-shirt and white panties. “Come inside now. Come in and fuck me.”

“There’s probably two things I wouldn’t do,” he said. “One is fuck you.”

“And the other?”

“I don’t know. I just hope there’s at least one more.” He entered, keeping her at arm’s length. There was a peculiar feeling here. Her face seemed emptied of herself. “What is it?”

“Oh? What is it? It’s Frank. Frank went in the hospital in Santa Rosa.”

“Frankheimer? He’s lucky he’s breathing.”

“And then they’ll move him to San Francisco when he’s more stabil-ized. They have to attach him together with screws. A lot of things like that.”

“You deal with him frequently? I wasn’t aware.”

“Not so frequently. But we’re strong together, very strong.”

“Yeah. And what about Nelson?”

“Nelson is paranoid and schizophrenic. He’s out of the picture.”

“Where is he?”

“I dropped him off at Billy’s road on Thursday to get his car.”

“That was a bad day, Thursday, a big bad day.”

“Nelson said he’s running away from two guys. But I met them, they’re not so bad.”

“Two guys from nowhere, like? With a camper pickup?”

“Yeah. And barking dogs. They treated me politely both times when they visited.”

“And when were those times, Melissa? Recently?”

“Oh. A while ago, once. And then just after Billy died. One or two days after.”

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“Shit. So they definitely know about Billy?”

“You mean that he’s dead?”

“I mean
about
him, that he exists.”

“Everybody’s having accidents. Something’s wrong.”

“Hey. Melissa. Could we turn that thing down?” She turned off the television and stood next to it with hunched shoulders, tightly clasped hands, toes working on the stained industrial carpeting. Lamentations carried down from the sheepfold. From the doorway he could see them in the corral mothering around the junk shell of some kind of sedan.

“I wanna make a strong recommendation now,” he said, “for when the cops come around to see you.”

“They didn’t come.”

“They will. And you better not mention the two men you just told me about. That’s a serious request. It ain’t no rif. You taking this in?”

“Yes. I’m not to mention the men with dogs.”

“I repeat: Erase those two fuckers from your experience.” She sat on her Hide-A-Bed and wrung her hands, dropped them palms-up and dead-looking on her bare thighs. “It’s supposed to be a place of healing. I don’t know what happened. Somebody did something very dark.”

A
t the top of Acorn Road, Merton recognized Billy Fairchild’s roofless International Scout turning into his path. For a mile or so he hung back a dozen car lengths and tailed it.

He was out of the fog. He closed up the cruiser’s windows and turned on the climate control. At a straightaway he pushed the pedal. Pickup still impressive. This Caprice was four years old but had less than eighteen thousand miles on it.

He flipped the siren on and off and pulled it over.

Idling behind the old contraption, he unbuttoned his holster flap, cracked his door, and waited. The still inland heat came in at him. He cut the engine.

In a minute the driver showed his hands, making it look as if he were stretching and yawning, and kept his hands in sight by grasping the windshield’s rim.

Merton got out then and came around on the driver’s side. “Hey, Surf.”

“Good afternoon. Top of the day to you.” He removed his sunshades and set them on the dusty dash.

338 / Denis Johnson

“You’re on my list of appointments, Clarence,” Merton told him. He fit the Doubtful profile: jeans, motorcycle boots, tank-top undershirt.

This was the recent victim’s brother’s partner in illegal cultivation, and also the recent victim’s partner in fixing up cars. The beach-boy partner, chasing young girls while selling shit down in Los Angeles. Tanned idiotic teenagers who don’t realize he’s almost thirty…“You visiting the Sheep Queen?”

“More or less. Why?”

“Can we step over to the shade? This isn’t a traffic stop.” Meadows swivelled to put his feet up on the passenger’s seat and jumped out over the door, and they walked under a tree. Merton snapped his holster shut. He unbuttoned his shirt pocket, took out his Skoal. Pried the lid loose. Offered it out.